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1/27/2017 Beck’s Song Reader: An Unbound Music Book | Érudit | Mémoires du livre v8 n1 2016 | Zone clients Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture Volume 8, numéro 1, automne 2016 La littérature sauvage / Literature Unbound Sous la direction de Denis Saint­Amand Direction : Marie­Pier Luneau (directrice) Éditeur : Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec ISSN : 1920­602X (numérique) DOI : 10.7202/1038035ar Article Beck’s Song Reader: An Unbound Music Book Kate Maxwell Abstract The pop/alternative musician Beck created a stir in the music world when he released his 2012 “album” Song Reader as a book compilation of individual pieces of sheet music. This included a guide to reading music notation, together with an introduction describing the work’s intentions and inviting readers to perform their own versions of the songs. Two years later, a recording of the songs interpreted by various well­known artists was issued. The video to one of these, Jack White’s interpretation of “I’m Down,” focuses entirely on the presentation of the track in the book­album Song Reader: the musical notation, lyrics, and artwork. Using multimodal discourse analysis together with Derrida’s notion of grammatology, this article will analyse both the book­album and the “I’m Down” video. If the Derridean violence of writing brings speech under its over­ arching wings, then notation can be seen as dominating musical discourse: the habit of not notating popular music is in fact a (usually subconscious) semiotic decision to differentiate from the (classical/art) music tradition. Song Reader’s release as a book, only to be later reappropriated as a “normal” album, means that it can be understood as an example of “unbound” popular music reincorporated into the mainstream—yet the “I’m Down” video can be read (literally) as a rebellion against this. Or can it? Without their “alternative mainstream” status, neither Beck nor White would have been able to exploit the popular music business in this way. To what extent can the institutional discourse of popular music be infiltrated from the inside? What is the status of “unbound” music­as­literature? Résumé Beck, musicien pop/alternatif, a créé un certain remous dans le monde musical en 2012 en faisant paraître son « album » Song Reader sous la forme d’un livre, soit une compilation de partitions individuelles. On y trouvait des instructions pour la lecture de la notation musicale, ainsi qu’une « Introduction » décrivant l’oeuvre et ses intentions, et invitant le lecteur à réaliser ses propres versions des chansons. Deux ans plus tard, un enregistrement des chansons par divers musiciens connus a paru. La vidéo de l’une de ces chansons, « I’m Down », interprétée par Jack White, porte sur la présentation de cette pièce dans le livre­album Song Reader : la notation musicale, les paroles, les illustrations. S’appuyant sur les principes de l’analyse multimodale du discours et sur la grammatologie de Derrida, le présent article propose une étude du livre­album, ainsi que de la vidéo « I’m Down ». Si la violence de la lettre derridienne fait de la parole une partie intégrante de l’archi­écriture, la notation musicale peut être considérée comme un discours musical dominant : l’habitude de ne pas écrire la musique populaire constitue en fait une décision sémiotique, généralement subconsciente, de se distancier de la tradition musicale (classique). L’oeuvre Song Reader, parue d’abord en tant que livre, mais envisagée ultérieurement comme un album « ordinaire », offre un exemple de production musicale sauvage récupérée par le courant musical dominant, récupération contre laquelle la vidéo de « I’m Down » semble littéralement se rebeller. Mais est­ce vraiment le cas? Sans leur double statut d’artistes alternatifs et populaires, ni Beck ni White n’auraient pu tirer parti du marché de cette façon. Dans quelle mesure est­il possible d’infiltrer de l’intérieur le discours institutionnel associé à la musique populaire? Quel est le statut de la musique en tant que littérature « sauvage »? You’ve taken the notes from your head and played them out loud on a public annou[n]cement instead ’Cause all your thoughts get distorted The feedback goes on and you’ve ruined the song While ev’ryone just plays along It’s only the notes that you’ve played that drowned out the thoughts from a song that was lost And the song you sang it didn’t have a name There was nothing but the song we were singing. [1] https://www.erudit.org/revue/memoires/2016/v8/n1/1038035ar.html 1/13 1/27/2017 Beck’s Song Reader: An Unbound Music Book | Érudit | Mémoires du livre v8 n1 2016 | 1 In 2012, the alternative pop musician Beck released his album Song Reader not as a recording, but as sheet music, “an album that could only be heard by playing the songs.” [2] The project was on the one hand a work to recreate the popular musical culture of a past era (the early twentieth­century United States) for contemporary audiences, an era before the advent of commercial recording, where “[h]ome­played music had been so widespread that nearly half the country had bought the sheet music for a single song, and presumably gone through the trouble of learning to play it.” [3] On the other hand, the project’s genesis in the early twenty­first century sprang, at least in part, from a reaction to the use of technology in pop music: There was an unspoken division between the music you heard on the radio and the music you were able to play with your own hands. By then, recorded music was no longer just the document of a performance—it was a composite of style, hooks, and production techniques, an extension of a popular personality’s image within a current sound. [4] 2 The book­album, then, is an unbound music book: by releasing it only as sheet music, the individual tracks were opened to a level of interpretation, participation, and expression that goes beyond the karaoke machine and the cover version: [5] Don’t feel beholden to what’s notated. Use any instrument you want to. Change the chords; rephrase the melodies. Keep only the lyrics, if desired. Play it fast or slow, swung or straight. Take a song and make it an instrumental or an a cappella. Play it for friends or only for yourself. These arrangements are starting­off points; they don’t originate from any definitive recording or performance. [6] 3 This story of Song Reader, which I have briefly retold here with heavy reliance on Beck’s own words, is not the full story. In this article I will focus on two further aspects of the book­album. First, the poetics of the presentation of the tracks in Song Reader is a major feature that cannot easily be captured in any sounding performance. Indeed, Song Reader is remarkable for its contribution to the discourse of musical notation in popular music, and an understanding of this notion through the use of multimodal critical discourse analysis will form the backbone of my study. My second principal line of enquiry focuses on the release in 2014 of a recording of Song Reader by various artists, including and co­produced by Beck. This went directly against the claims at the time of the book­ album’s release in 2012 that it would only be released as sheet music. [7] The professionally made video to Jack White’s version of “I’m Down” features not the musicians but the music notation, and it is on the video to this that the final part of my study will focus. Music Notation in Popular Music Discourses 4 The relationship between music notation and popular music is not simple. Some popular music traditions (e.g. big band jazz) make extensive use of music notation; others (e.g. blues) use it less. In many cases, it boils down to the personal choice or the circumstances of the musicians involved: for instance, if a musician has never learnt music notation, they will not use it. While pop songs from the era nostalgically referenced in Song Reader were commonly distributed (and presumably played) through their sheet music, it is now a commonly held, if rarely stated, belief that musical literacy—the ability to read musical notation—is a skill that is considered to belong to classical music. Within current discourses of popular music, notation is noticeable by its absence. 5 Yet, as Beck says in his Preface, prior to the wide use of sound­recording technology, music notation was the only way that music of any genre could be transmitted remotely. Music notation is itself a performance. [8] The tradition on which Song Reader draws, of popular songs transmitted as sheet music, did not die with the advent of radio, video, or even digital media: record labels and publishers still work together to produce sheet music versions (usually piano reduction, lyrics, and chords) of popular albums after their release. Indeed, Beck’s inspiration for Song Reader was that seeing his “original recording [of a ’90s album] . distilled down to notation made it obvious that most of the songs weren’t intended to work that way.” [9] 6 Due to its absence from the discourses of popular music, music notation—or even its lack—in popular music is very rarely analysed. While analysts such as David Machin and Theo Van Leeuwen may make extensive use of the tools of critical discourse analysis and multimodality to discuss aspects of popular music including artwork, videos, melody, harmony, and more, the general absence of musical notation from their discussion is striking.

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